The United States currently has the world's largest postal system, which handles billions of pieces of mail each year. The servicing of mail delivery involves three general steps: collection, sorting, and delivery. Collection takes place through a series of local post office facilities and Bulk Mail Entry Units (BMEU) spread throughout the United States. The mail is then sent from local post offices or BMEUs to central facilities known as sectional centers. At the sectional centers, high speed automated equipment sorts the large volumes of mail based on the destination post office or zip code for delivery.
Recently, the postal system has been used as a weapon of terror and fear by the inclusion of harmful chemical or biological contaminants, such as, for example, the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis (anthrax), within or on a mail piece. Such contaminants can be carried in several forms, including for example, a powder form. The harmful effects of only a few contaminated mail pieces can be far reaching, as cross-contamination of other mail pieces can easily occur when the mail pieces come in contact with each other or are passed through the same machines during sorting. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that tens of thousands of mail pieces could have become cross-contaminated from only two contaminated mail pieces.
Ideally, it would be desirous for the postal authority to examine and/or test each piece of mail individually for any possible contamination before it enters the mail system, thereby isolating any contaminated mail pieces and preventing any cross-contamination. With the large volume of mail processed daily, however, such an approach is not feasible due to the time and cost that such an undertaking would entail.
In addition, a business or company that receives large amounts of mail delivered by the postal authority has an interest in ensuring the safety of their employees, including the personnel handling the mail for internal delivery and the intended recipient. Ideally, it would be advantageous for a business or company to examine and/or test each piece of mail individually for any possible contamination before it is delivered internally, thereby isolating any contaminated mail pieces and preventing any cross-contamination. To be effective, however, such a system must be economical and easy to implement and operate. Currently, the only type of system for such examination requires mail room personnel to open and visually inspect each piece of mail before it is delivered internally to the intended recipient. This potentially requires an extensive amount of time, as well as higher level of risk associated with such manual opening and visual inspection.
Thus, there exists a need for a method and system that allows large volumes of mail pieces to be automatically tested for any possible contaminants in a relatively short time and in a manner similar to existing to mail handling.